Anduril introduces new low-cost cruise missile “Barracuda”

Anduril Industries has unveiled its Barracuda family of cruise missiles, designed to add a low-cost weapon to the U.S. military's inventory that can be manufactured in large numbers by minimally trained workers using non-specialized tools.

The air-breathing weapons have not yet been equipped with sensors because customer needs have not yet been defined, but the weapons are in flight testing, company officials told reporters on Sept. 11. The Barracuda family is designed to be quickly upgradeable through software and an open system architecture.

The weapon family includes the Barracuda-100, -250 and -500.

The -500 is designed for “cargo launch,” said Diem Salmon, Anduril vice president for air sovereignty and attack. That refers to the Air Force's “Rapid Dragon” concept, in which pallets of cruise missiles are fired from the back of a C-17 or C-130 transport. That concept has been tested with AGM-158 Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missiles (JASSMs).

It's also the kind of mission the Air Force and Defense Innovation Unit are studying for their Enterprise Test Vehicle program, which launched in June. Anduril is one of four contenders and is touting the Barracuda-500, Salmon said. The other companies in the running are Integrated Solutions for Systems, Inc., Leidos Dynetics and Zone 5 Technologies. Salmon could not comment on the progress of the ETV program.

The pallet-launched missiles “don't necessarily require integration into aircraft,” she said. The -250, on the other hand, is designed for internal transport on the F-35 and other platforms.

The Barracuda is “available in configurations that offer a range of over 500 nautical miles, a payload capacity of over 100 pounds, 5G maneuverability and an endurance of over 120 minutes,” the company said in a press release.

“All Barracudas are compatible with a variety of payloads and engagement mechanisms, supporting a variety of different missions and providing soldiers with an adaptable and upgradeable capability to address evolving threats,” the company said.

A Barracuda-500 cruise missile. Courtesy of Anduril

A Barracuda-500 cruise missile. Courtesy of Anduril

A Barracuda-100 cruise missile. Courtesy of Anduril

Anduril “aims to be 30 percent lower in cost than systems with comparable performance,” Salmon said, without making comparisons to specific weapons. The company believes these savings can be achieved through reusing subsystems and simplifying manufacturing with low-cost materials.

“So instead of developing tailored capabilities for each individual weapon system, how can we make the whole thing simpler?” asked Salmon. Open architectures are one solution, another is to design the missile so that it can be manufactured by a factory worker with little expertise and using a small number of tools and parts.

“A single Barracuda takes 50 percent less time to manufacture, requires 95 percent less tooling and 50 percent fewer parts than competing solutions on the market today,” the company said in press materials. “This makes the Barracuda family of AAVs on average 30 percent cheaper than other solutions, enabling affordable mass production and cost-effective deployment at scale.”

Anduril has unveiled its idea for a manufacturing facility called “Arsenal” in recent weeks, saying the state-of-the-art factory would produce weapons such as the Barracuda and the Fury fighter jet. The company believes the U.S. will need 10 times as many precision weapons as it currently has to deter China and avoid “running out of supplies” in the first weeks of a major conflict, said Chris Brose, Anduril's chief strategy officer.

“We've been working on it for several years,” said Brose. “This is a real system. It's already part of real programs. It's flying and we're very happy to finally be able to say more about it publicly.”

“The problem we are trying to solve here is, I think, familiar to many of you: America and our allies and partners do not have enough weapons. Period, end of story. And we are unable to produce the quantity of weapons we need to build a deterrent against a rival of equal standing.”

Brose referred to war games that showed that the US runs out of crucial ammunition reserves in the first few weeks of a conflict.

“Then we struggle for years, or theoretically would struggle, to replenish all the weapons that we have expended,” he said. “And I think Ukraine has highlighted this problem in recent years with far simpler tactical weapons systems, not to mention the larger critical munitions that will be so important in an INDOPACOM scenario.”

Salmon said it was “unrealistic of us to think that in 10 years we will know exactly how many we need to produce” and factories need to be able to efficiently “ramp up” production, and sometimes you have to ramp it down.

She added that Anduril wants to reduce part count, tooling and complexity and “rely more on commercial components.” The entire workforce will not be “tailored to a single system,” she said.

Brose said each variant of the Barracuda “leverages core subsystems that are reusable within the family of systems. These systems can be assembled using tools that you probably have literally in your garage – screwdrivers, pliers, things like that. So there are no limitations on what you can do with highly specialized tools, highly specialized manufacturing processes and highly specialized labor, which we're never going to have enough of. It was designed with the exact opposite approach, which is: I need to leverage commercial supply chains as much as possible. I need to make the weapon as easy to manufacture and assemble as possible.”

All three variants are currently in circulation, Salmon said.

“These are things we actively work on every day,” she said.